Dan Romero on Warpcast

Dan Romero pfp

Stream of consciousness on channels 1. The overwhelming top complaint about the new channels is “I lost access” / “I can’t cast in the channels I used to” 2. The root of this is channels ran for a year as public topics / hashtags and we nudged people to cast in channels for a minor distribution boost. 3. When we launched channels last year, one of the fears was people wouldn’t cast in channels, since Twitter has tried versions of this and people were too used to casting on main / in the home timeline. 4. Farcaster user behavior was more nascent / “plastic” / early adopters. So we ended up getting most people to cast in channels. 5. The other reality is most people want to maximize distribution. So telling them “channels = more distribution” is hard to unlearn, esp. if you’re more of a weekly active user.

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Dan Romero pfp

6. We could have renamed channels to communities or groups. But then the issue is people would have said what happened to channels. 7. Most people can’t be bothered to read the manual / what’s changed. So part of my job is to repeat that 100-1000x across a variety of casts and replies. 8. Another issue is the original group of channels that got huge audiences as a result of the growth earlier this year. People see the big follower number and want access despite the new model not giving you a distribution boost / explicitly designed to not have canonical topics. 9. Removing the legacy channels wouldn’t be good since some owners did do a bunch of work in the model to grow them.

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links 🏴 pfp

So does casting to channels give you a boost or not? The way @zinger explained his understanding was that when you cast to channels, channels followers + your followers might see the cast. Therefore always better to cast to channels. Is this how it worked before the changes? Is this how it works now? Just curious, 🙏

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Adam pfp

Curious as to why there was never an attempt to surface a change log/ high level announcements on the side panel? Seems like good way to at least reduce the amount of times you'd need to repeat yourself. Another suggestion would be to have this accessible via a dedicated page on the left panel (somewhere between bookmarks and warps). Like the notifications tab, a dot could signifying when a new update is ready to review. Seems at least worth experimenting with.

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Kieran Daniels 🎩 pfp

Kieran Daniels 🎩

The problem is people. Once you give most people the power over people online, then they will always use it. I’m still positive that through experimenting a balance will be found, but handing over channels like /music to people who want it to be a private club / eco chamber, ruined the magic of farcaster for a lot of people. It only took a week for the cliques to form and channels that were essentially public goods with 40k users now only have a few hundred “cool kids” who can post. I know that this allows the chance for other smaller channels to form but it just put a dark shadow over something that was objectively free and not censored before a couple weeks ago.

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shazow pfp

Suggestion to try when doing a release like this next time: Offer a timeline for the "experiment" or "evaluation", any timeline. Example: We're changing how channels work, this is a community experiment that we'll evaluate in 60 days, primarily looking at X, Y, Z metrics and secondary effects. Here are the changes: ... Note you don't need to shut down after N days, it just sets expectations of how things are evaluated and when we can expect some more reflection on whether the changes were good or bad. Realistically you can keep iterating, but I think people will be much more open minded about changing their behavior if framed like this. Open ended changes feel scary and arbitrary (despite you doing tons of work gathering feedback and ideas ahead of time), this gives a bit of rails for people to hold onto.

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vrypan |--o--| pfp

Thank you for the insights. They are very useful, following the evolution of Farcaster is like a crash course in product dev.

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patxol 🔷 anser.social pfp

patxol 🔷 anser.social

Give it / you / the team / the ecosystem some time. Changes are difficult and scary, but for newcomers channels make sense. I don’t think you’ll get churn from this, you might get less daily casts, but I strongly believe that the new model will bring more stickiness and community feeling. It’s a pain go go through it as a builder but also it brings great perspectives.

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shoni.eth pfp

i think you place a lot more importance on distribution than us cuz you said it a lot. yeah i post to channels for a little boost sometimes but its mostly more a categorical thing, /lazy is things i come back to, /books was cool books and people that like them but now if i want to find books i have to use /books but since the mod doesn’t like me i have to cast into /book that’s true for a lot of channels including farcaster. i dont think its a big deal but was only a subtractive experience for me most of my behavior change now is using the channel as a hashtag which is a little pointless and mostly out of annoyance or less distribution in alt channels

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Jacek.degen.eth 🎩 pfp

Jacek.degen.eth 🎩

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